How a Wife Aids Her Husband

How can they be 50% of your ministry? Well, many times they may seem to be the invisible 50%, but believe me, without a wife's support, help, encouragement, that a minister would not be nearly as effective as he is.

I believe that many wives, ministers' wives, feel like perhaps they fail, they don't meet up to standards. There's a tremendous amount of stress being in the ministry, and also on a minister's wife. There's pressure, there are hardships that a minister's wife goes through that many people never stop to think about. There's constant phone messages, people are constantly calling. There's office work. Without my wife, I would have stacks of paper here and there all over the place, and she knows what to do with them. So, I come home sometimes, they've disappeared, and they've been put in their proper places, categorized.

You have children, you have visits that you go on, you run the circuit. My wife has for about 45 years without missing a beat, unless she was sick. Always run the circuit with me. That means both churches, every Sabbath, for 40-something years, that she did it. She was hardly ever sick during that period of time. You have your marriage, you have working on your own marriage. You have concerns about members, their lives, their problems, their difficulties. Women are very concerned about these things. They carry these emotionally.

They share their husband's ministry as a team. Perhaps, a minister's wife hasn't worked out in the public as the way most people. Sometimes, it's an assumption that they don't have stress in their lives, which is the exact opposite. They live with stress. They're married to a stressor. It's like the old saying about Vencelyn Barty.

He didn't have ulcers, he was just a carrier of them. Same way about a minister. He's always dealing with situations, and these come home likewise, and shared with his wife. I think all of us, if we're married, or even if we're not married, need to realize how valuable your maid is, how valuable women are, how much they contribute to us as men, how they assist us, and how God designed women to be an asset in marriage.

The same thing. The reason why I mention a minister's wife, because I have one, and I can speak from first-hand information. Many don't realize that a minister's wife's life is a very lonely life, because she doesn't have a lot of just real close friends. She's friends with everybody, but a lot of times in an area, even though you see everybody, there's just not that closeness. You grew up in a local church area, and you've been in a local church area 5, 10, 15, 20 years, over a period of time you develop friendships, you get to know each other, and there is a bond, there's a unity there.

And I'm not saying that doesn't develop, but there's not the closeness where you have just somebody you can sit down and talk to about intimate, real close things. You're constantly moving. We've moved every 4 years, 7 or 8 months, and that's a major move from one area to another.

While we've lived in an area, we generally live in a couple of places. You're there. Life is unsettling. You don't have roots. You can't look back and say, well, here's a place where we live. This is home. Maybe you grew up in an area, lived in a house with your parents, and you look back on that, that's home. Well, that's not true. I remember we lived in Chicago for 5 years. One day we put our son on the plane, our oldest son, Arthur.

He went off to Ambassador College. Next day we moved to Mount Pocono. So we were that far apart. He came home from college, and he came home to a house that he'd never seen before. He wasn't home. He didn't have a room.

His room, what would have been considered his room, was taken over by one of the other boys. So he had no place to go. So when he went back, next time he came home, well, we're in a different place. So it really makes a difference. There are emotional stresses that you're faced with. You face tragic situations. You're always exposed to funerals, to deaths, to sickness. There's an emotional drain. It tests your mental health and emotional health.

You have to be a wife, mother, assistant to a minister. I remember in our early years, the first three or four years we were married, that my wife and I lived in a car. We were required in those days to have at least 20 visits a week. Now, you just stop and multiply it out. When we first came out, we were told by the church pastor, make a list. So we copied all the names down. Didn't have computers back then. And we were told, go visit.

You had to visit Sunday, half day Monday. The other half a day you were doing office work. You had to type up every visit, put it in a report, and send it to Mr. Meredith so that he could read it. Then you visited all day Tuesday, all day Wednesday, all day Thursday, half day Friday. Then Friday afternoon you were expected to prepare a sermon or sermonette. Then run the circuit on the Sabbath. Saturday night was always involved with baptisms, counseling, socials, whatever it might be. And you just live in your car. My wife and I have talked about it.

Our first eight or ten years of our marriage are total blank. We don't ever remember going shopping. We don't ever remember seeing a movie. We don't ever remember... We don't ever remember. Because many of those things we just never did. You just... you know, you lived, you worked. And when children came along, you were involved with those. Our first circuit was a four, four and a half hour drive. We said a four hour drive, but it always took about four and a half hours.

Go from Wheeling to Charleston in West Virginia. And we'd have spokesmen's club Saturday night. The club would end about ten, ten thirty. The time you said goodbyes, maybe ten thirty to eleven, you'd leave. Four hour drive home. So you never got home when you had club, and that was every other week, until something like two thirty to three thirty in the morning.

And then the next morning at nine o'clock, you had another spokesman's club. Eleven thirty, you had another spokesman's club. And then you were expected to go visiting. You know, after that. That was just sort of the routine. And that type of routine will wear you down after a while. You know, it has an effect on your health.

So many ministers' wives have had physical problems, health problems, as a result of the stress and the constant pressures. But all marriages go through difficulties, trials, less than perfect circumstances. And we can all tell our own story. I'm just relating what I've gone through, and I know what we've gone through, and what most of the people who've been in the ministry have gone through. I hope, explaining a little bit about what Norma and how she helps me in my job. But do we all realize how much our wives help us?

How much they contribute to us? How does a woman add to the stature of her husband? How many women feel like they've failed in their calling, or feel they fall short? A joyous, stable marriage is a precious thing. It doesn't just happen accidentally. It takes caring, it takes sharing, it takes dedication, it takes work of two people who deeply want a happy home. So we're going to take a look today at what the Bible has to say about how a wife aids her husband. Let's go back to Genesis 2, verse 18. Genesis 2, verse 18, where God very clearly spells out about man and woman and marriage.

The Lord God said, it is not good. That man should be alone. I will make him a helper, comparable to him. And that's a very good translation. So it's not good for a man to be alone. That's clearly stated. So God made a helper, the word helper there, means an aid, a help, an aider, a supporter. So the woman was created to aid her husband, to help him, to support him. And man is not the great all-conquering hero, self-sufficient in need of no help. Rather, we need help.

We need it badly. Man is not complete by himself. A woman is not complete by herself, either. We need one another. New American commentary has this to say about Genesis 2.18. God has created human life to have fellowship with him, but also to be a social entity, building relationships with other human beings. Man was not, or will not live until he loves, gives himself away to another on his own level. Isolation is not the divine norm for human beings. Humanity is the creation of God, the commissioning of man and woman to rule over the good land.

In chapter 1, verse 28 of Genesis, involves procreation, and only together can they achieve their destiny. This unity, however, is not merely sexual. It involves sharing spiritual, intellectual, and emotional dimensions as well. The Jewish sentiment notes this, quoting a Jewish author, Whoever has no wife exists without goodness, without a helpmate, without joy, without blessing, without atonement, without well-being, without a full life.

Indeed, such a one reduces the representation of divine image on earth, expressing the Jewish sentiment concerning marriage. So you find that God says that if we've experienced marriage, that it should add this dimension, that a wife is there to aid or to assist her husband. So I hope all of us as men realize that that's what our wife is there doing and helping. Now, you'll notice here it says she is a helper.

King James Version says a helpmate. New King James Version translates it as a helper comparable to him. And that's exactly what the word means in the Hebrew. One who is complementary to him are compatible to him. So God created the woman to add to our lives, men. A woman was created to share man's life, share his love, to respond to him, to encourage him. Now, when it says that she's there to help, she's there to help and supply what we lack.

It's a matter of two halves make a whole. And God created the man, but the man didn't have everything that is needed. God created the woman. She doesn't have everything that's needed. But together you become a team, you become a unit. And as we read back in Psalm 121, this notice back here, Psalm 121, it describes God here. And I want you to notice, I will lift up my eyes to the hills, from whence comes my help. My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth. So to be a helper is not an inferior position.

God is our helper. God is there to assist us, help us. God supplies what we lack, and He is there to guide us. A woman's mind and heart is made to enthusiastically share the ideas and hopes of the man that she loves. Many things we do, we do twice as well because we have a mate. We're twice as effective. She helps to balance us out as men. And going back again to Genesis 2, verse 24, we read this about a husband and wife and that relationship.

It says, Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother, be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. Now the word joined, you'll see in your margin, says literally, means to clean. The word in the King James Version says she is to cleave to her husband, and it means to be glued. You look up the definition, to stick to, to bond. You become one flesh. So when you get married, the relationship you're to have is not isolation.

It is two people who bond, who stick together, who are close.

So what does a wife bring to the marriage? When she comes to the marriage, what does she bring to the table? Add to the marriage. Well, there are many things that a wife can add, and we realize that we're all different, and I'm speaking in general terms here, because maybe not everybody brings exactly everything in the same way, but I believe that a woman brings a focus on people. Men focus generally on things. Women focus on relationships and attitudes and approaches. They're very good at that, whereas that is not normally a strength that most men have. In Romans 12, it is a principle. Now, this principle applies to both men and women, but I think in talking about a focus, it certainly describes women.

We're told in Romans 12, A woman tends to do that. Have you ever sat on the couch with your wife and you're watching a movie and tears are running down her face and you look over and she's crying?

You're sitting there and you may feel a little stir, but she is responding to what she sees. Women tend to go up and down emotionally. She shares with people their problems. She identifies with them. Women tend to have empathy, which means she feels as they feel. The wife rejoices also in her husband's triumphs. She weeps with him and his sorrows, maybe his failures. Yet a wife is there and should be there to constantly bolster her husband, balance him, help him in every possible way. There are times that I find that I'm about to run off in a certain direction, and my wife comes back and says, Well, have you considered this? And I said, No, I haven't considered that. And we began to think about it and talk about it, and I changed my mind because what I was about to do wasn't exactly right. I remember coming out from Ambassador College and into the ministry. I was 22, Narma was 21 at that time. I knew very little about one half of humanity. I'm talking about the female half of humanity. I remember one of the first funerals we went to. I went to the funeral. Here's the grieving widow. I had no idea what to say to her, or one not to say to her. But my wife had empathy, would go up, hug her, say, you were praying for you, were concerned about you, express sympathy. And slowly but surely, I began to learn that you didn't have to have some wise, erudite thing to say, that you just simply needed to let people know you're there, that you're concerned for them. And I began to grow in that way. Now, where did I learn that? Well, I began to learn it from my wife. I began to see how she responded. Without her, I would not have learned that. I would have bumbled along, and maybe I'd picked it up as time would go on. But you find that men, many times, lack sensitivity to others, and just really being sensitive to them. Women tend to talk face to face, heart to heart. Men talk over their shoulders. They look over here, and they talk to another fellow sitting over there. Or they look up, they look down, they look off in a different direction. And it's interesting, I was looking up an article by Michael G. Connor, Understanding the Differences in Men and Women. He had this to say, women have four times as many brain cells neurons connecting the right side to the left side of the brain. So there are more connections. You've got the right side and the left side. One tends to be a little more emotional, the other a little more logical. Well, women have more pathways uniting these. Here we are, men. Here women are, like this. And the latter, finally, provides physical evidence that supports the observation that men rely easily and more heavily on their left brain to solve one problem, one step at a time, logically. Well, here it is. Well, first you do this, then maybe you do that, and then you can do this. Women have more efficient access to both sides of the brain and therefore greater use of the right brain. Women can focus on more than one problem at one time and frequently prefer to solve problems through multiple activities at a time. Nearly every parent has observed how young girls find conversations of young boys boring. Young boys express confusion, would rather play sports and participate actively in a conversation between five girls who are discussing as many as three subjects at once.

So little girls are just jabbering away and talking to each other, and boys look at them. They want to do something. Be active. Climb a tree. Run around. Dig dirt. Eat worms. Whatever it is that little boys want to do. And, you know, girls, ee! And so you see very early on that we're a little different. As men, we're incomplete in many ways.

Now, I'm talking about what women bring to a marriage, so we're going to concentrate more on them today. So women also bring a special feminine insight into our lives. Mr. Armstrong, when he was alive, thought that his wife had special insight into reading people. I know my wife does. I can walk into a room. We can talk to people and walk out, and she would say, Did you see that? Or did you pick up on such and such? And I'd say, What are you talking about?

I walk into a room, and I notice there are four walls in there, and there's a floor. I'm standing on it. But when it comes to other things, men don't always pick up on them. Women spend more time analyzing people, and they have instinct. It's called womanly instinct, feminine instinct and insight. How many times has a man, maybe he would be in a group and walk out, and the wife said, Did you see those shoes that so-and-so had on?

No. You know they had shoes on. They were beautiful yellow shoes. And what about that pink dress? Pink dress? Who had a pink dress on? You know they were dressed, but what did they have on? Well, women know and pick up also on attitudes. If somebody's discouraged, down, being catty, whatever it might be. Quoting again from the article by Michael G.

Connor, he says this, At the heart of sensitivity is our capacity to form and appreciate and maintain relationships that are rewarding. Even here, there are important differences. For men, what demonstrates a solid relationship is quite different from that of most women, that most women have. Men feel closer and validated through shared activities. Such activities include sports, competition, outdoor activities or sexual activities that are decidedly active and physical.

While both men and women can appreciate and engage in these activities, they often have preferential differences. Women, on the other hand, feel closer and validated through, guess what, communications, communicating, dialogue, and intimately sharing of experiences and emotional content and personal perspective. Men tend to find such sharing and involvement uncomfortable, if not overwhelming. But this is the way that women relate. You can see women relating to one another, and they're really into a conversation.

What are men talking about? Cars. They're talking about the latest football game. They're talking about the guns that they might have, or hunting experiences, or whatever it might be. I don't know what accounts for all the differences, but obviously God has created and designed us to be a little different. You're not just marrying another you. You're marrying someone who brings various traits into a marriage. Women are tremendous helps. As I said, they bring various insights into our lives. When we had our five children, they were growing up.

My wife could pick up on attitudes just like that, that they had insights, what they were trying to do. She would tell me, and I said, well, you need to handle this. I'd handle what? Well, she'd have to tell me what I needed to handle. Very little would get by her, and I think that's true of most women.

Very little would get by. Without her, I'd be a failure. We were a team. God intended that be the way it is. Women have generally greater insight and awareness, as I said. Let me again refer back to this article by Michael G. Connor. Men and women approach problems with similar goals, but with different considerations. While men and women can solve problems equally well, their approach and their processes are often quite different. For most women, sharing and discussing a problem presents an opportunity to explore, deepen, or strengthen the relationship with the person they're talking with.

Women are usually more concerned about how problems are solved than merely solving the problem itself. For women, solving a problem can profoundly impact whether they feel closer or less alone, or whether they feel distant and less connected. The process of solving a problem can strengthen or weaken a relationship. Most men or less concerned do not feel the same as women about solving a problem. Men approach problems in a very different manner than women.

For most men, solving a problem presents an opportunity to demonstrate their competence. I know how to do this. I can handle this. Their strength of resolve and their commitment to a relationship. How the problem is solved is not nearly as important as solving it efficiently in the best possible manner.

Men have a tendency to dominate and to assume authoritatively, or authority in a problem-solving process. If you ever notice men, your wife brings the problem up and you say, well, that's easy. You know, let's just do this. Well, they're not wanting you to give them an answer. They're wanting to discuss it. They're wanting to have you understand it. Since they set aside their feelings, provided the dominance hierarchy was agreed upon in advance and respected, they are often distracted and do not attend well to the quality of the relationship while solving the problem. They're not thinking about relationship. They're just thinking about solving the problem. So, I've noticed this in myself. Likewise, something comes up. Oh, this is the problem. Well, let me tell you how to solve this. You go immediately to solving it instead of talking about it. The wife wants to talk about it. In fact, many times wives are not looking for a solution. They're looking for you to understand them. They're looking for you to show some concern. And so, there is a difference.

One of the things that men need to do in a marriage is ask their wives' opinion about things. How are we doing? How's the marriage? And I found over the years that when it comes to ministers and speaking, a lot of times members might flatter a minister. Wives don't. Your wives don't flatter. Your wives say, well, you did this. You still got this problem. You're saying that. You're repeating this. And on and on it goes. But we need to encourage one another so that we can both excel and work together. A wife also brings beauty and quality into our lives.

If you ever noticed, and I noticed bachelors who come to Ambassador College, ABC classes, we have one bachelor I can think of who would come with the most outlandish suits and arrangements. He might have a green pair of pants. He'd have a coat that looked like a clown's outfit. And then he would have a purple tie or something. And who put you together? Well, it never occurred to him that these things should match. Well, a lot of times in coordination of suits, ties, decorum, how to handle yourself. I don't know if you've ever had your wife tell you that you're about to leave the house. You're not going to wear that, are you? And wear what? Well, that tie with that suit, you're not going to go out in that outfit. What's wrong with this outfit? Well, it's just not appropriate. So you go back and you change. Or you change something. Women will generally have a better eye for coordination, decoration, and all of these things. I'm just always flabbergasted. My wife's ability to put things together, to arrange them. I used to come home and walk through where I thought couch used to be. And it wasn't there anymore. It was over here. And if you didn't turn the light on, you'd stumble over it. And your wives have those abilities. In fact, in 1 Corinthians 11 and verse 7, we read, The Jews were glory throughout the New Testament. She radiates. She's a reflection of the man. And so a wife is supposed to be a proper reflection on her marriage. When she gets married, what she does, what she says, how she conducts herself, is a reflection on her husband. A woman should add stature to her man, to her husband. And so a woman is able to add to him. Let's go back to the book of Proverbs, Proverbs chapter 31. And we will read here in verse 10, where it talks about a virtuous woman. Proverbs 31, verse 10, says, Who can find a virtuous wife? For her worth is far above rubies. The word virtuous means literally a wife of valor in the sense of all forms of excellence. Or, as the Jameson, Falset, and Brown commentary says, literally of strength, that is, moral courage. That she is virtuous. She has moral courage. She is valor in everything that she does. Verse 12 tells us, she does him good, not evil, all of the days of her life. It mentions that she is like a merchant ship in verse 14. She brings her food from afar. My wife will tell me she will get out. She has gone to the grocery store. She has gone to Sam's. She has gone to Costco's. She has gone to this store, to that store. She goes all over to gather things and to bring things, to find bargains. A wife is there to help and to share with her husband. There have been many, many years, many decades that we didn't have very much. You are raising four and five boys, and all of your children, you don't have too much. I remember the sticker shock. This was very early on. We went out and bought five pairs of tennis shoes. It cost us $200. Today, people spend $200 almost on a pair of tennis shoes. They don't call them tennis shoes or whatever kind of shoes they might be.

We just bought shoes for our boys to wear to school. We were flabbergasted at how much they cost. $200 for us was a lot of money. My wife saved every penny. Put back. Cut back here. Cut back there. She didn't go out and buy things for herself. She saved. We could take care of the family. You find that that's what a virtuous wife will do.

Verse 25 says, So, strength and honor. The word honor here in the Hebrew means, and it's translated, glory seven times in the Old Testament, majesty seven times, honor five times, beauty four times, comeliness, excellency, glorious, goodly. It means ornament, splendor, honor, splendor and majesty, honor and glory. So, for a wife who, as Proverbs 31 describes her, she has glory and splendor and majesty and honor that comes her way for how she lives.

They are her clothing, and she shall rejoice in time to come. Now, we all realize that in marriage there can be trials and problems, some of them of her own making, some of them not of her making. It's not always a bed of roses. But as you go through marriage, guess what?

You work together, you grow together, you mature together. We got married. I was 22, she was 21, as I mentioned. Well, we were both very young. And yet, at 30, she knew a lot more at 30, now you're a lot more at 31. At 50 and 49, we knew a lot more. You grow, you mature, you change.

You become a different person, you become more flexible, you become more balanced. And a wife adds tremendously when it comes to children, childbirth, all of those different things. I can remember extremely well that our first son had a colleague for several months when he was first born. You could count it at 11 o'clock, I think it was at night, it would start, and it would go to about 2 o'clock.

It would last two or three hours, and then he could go to sleep. Well, my wife would sit up with him. I'd wake up and, where is she? Well, she's in there, in the rocking chair, rocking Arthur and trying to comfort him. Even during this period of time with the colleague of the baby, she still loved me. She still appreciated me. I loved her. You grow to have a respect for your wife. You see the pain they go through in childbirth, and yet right after childbirth, you see the radiant joy that a wife has.

All that just sort of disappears in almost a second. To see that baby, to hold that baby, and to be able to look at it. You have to learn to care for one another. There would be times where you'd have to learn, well, my wife's been up several nights, and it's my time to stay up at night, or it's my time to rock the baby, or feed the baby, or change the diaper. You have to look after each other's health. So, it's a matter that we learn to compliment one another as we go along. Sometimes men complain that women talk too much. Have you ever heard that?

All she does is talk. Talk, talk, talk. Let me quote from a book, titled, You Just Don't Understand, Women and Men in Conversation, by Deborah Tannen. She's a sociologist. Tannen's research shows the difference between the communication styles of men and women, that they go far beyond socialization and appear to be inherent from the basic makeup of each sex.

Tannen first noticed these differences when studying video tapes another researcher had made of best friends asked to have a conversation together. In contrast to the girls, boys were extremely uncomfortable with this request. Girls in all age groups would face each other and immediately begin to talk. Eventually ended up discussing the problems of one girl. Boys, on the other hand, set parallel to each other. Here, here. They would jump from topic to topic, centered around a time, when they would go do something. They were going to go do something or have done something.

Tannen observed that for males, conversation is a way to negotiate your status in the group and keep people from pushing you around. You use talk to reserve your independence. Females, on the other hand, use conversation to negotiate closeness and intimacy. Talk is the essence of intimacy. So being best friends means sitting up and talking. So if you say your wife is your best friend, ask yourself the question, do you talk to her?

She'll talk with you, but do you talk to her? For boys, activities, doing things together are central. Just sitting and talking is not essential. Part of friendship for boys. They're friends with the boys. They do things with. So you're doing things with the boys, and that's somebody you're a friend with. It's not hard for even these simple observations to see the potential problems when men and women communicate.

Women create feelings of closeness by conversing with their friends and lovers. Men don't usually communicate in this way, so they can't figure out why their women are constantly talk-talk-talking. Eventually, many men will tune their woman out. The ambiguous image of the housewife at the breakfast table, talking to her husband, has his head buried in the newspaper, comes to mind. Tanner notes that men are confused by the various ways women use conversation to be intimate with others. One of the things, or the way she calls trouble-talk, she said, for women, talking about troubles is the essence of connection. I tell you my troubles, you tell me your troubles. And we're close. Men, however, hear trouble-talk as a request for advice. Well, you've got troubles? You've got a problem? Let me solve it. So they respond with a solution. When a man offers this kind of information, the woman often feels if he is trying to diminish her problem or cut her off. She wants him to understand the problem, communicate it. In his eyes, he's being supportive because men don't talk to each other about their troubles, unless they really do want a solution. How many men do you know who come up and say, I'm having this emotional problem to another man? Let's sit down here. Maybe you can help me with this. You may have never said that in your life. But your wife will say it almost all the time, something of that nature. Talking about their problems is wallowing in them. The man doesn't realize that his woman was simply trying to establish a certain kind of intimacy with her, providing him to reciprocate and share himself with her. Because of these essential differences and approaches, Tanner says that the most common complaint she hears from men about women is that women complain all the time and don't want to do anything about it. Men misunderstand the ritual nature of women's complaining. They want to talk about it, not always looking for an answer, but simply to talk. We all have to learn how to express ourselves. Women have to learn what men are like. Men have to learn what women are like. When it comes to emotions, many men suppress their emotions. They grow up as children. A boy grows up and he's told, boys don't cry, boys don't show emotion, suck it up, get out there. So, boys tend to hold things in, whereas girls very easily, from very early age, are that way. So, it's, I think, reinforced in society. Now, why is it that when there is a discussion or argument, that women seem to be able to remember every detail? Have you ever noticed that? I was talking with somebody the other day. He said, well, whenever my wife and I have an argument, we resolve it very quickly. She's right, I'm wrong. And he said, that's the very quick way of resolving it. I said, yes, you're right, I'm wrong. And he goes on. But have you ever wondered why this is true? You can talk to a woman and things could have happened years ago. And how does she remember that? I don't even remember the incident, but how does she remember all those details?

Well, again, from O'Connell, he says, Women have the enhanced ability to recall memories that have strong emotional components to them, associated with emotional feelings. They can also recall events or experiences that have similar emotions in common. So, you were emotional about this event, but that event reminds you of another event. And so you begin to connect the events because there's an emotional component to all of them. Women are very adept at recalling information events or experiences in which there is a common emotional theme. Men tend to recall events using strategies that rely upon reconstructing the experience in terms of elements, tasks, or activities that took place.

Profound experiences that are associated with competition or physical activities are more easily recalled.

Now, I can describe to you a lot of basketball games I've been in, football games I've been in, hunting experiences I've had, but some of the other things, they evaporate. Again, those are activities. You have warm, fuzzy feelings about, well, that's where I got my first deer. I remember getting my first deer. That was a white tail. I remember getting my first mule deer. And I can describe that to you in great detail. But women can describe what's going on in the marriage and those types of things. There appears to be a structural and chemical basis for observed memory differences between men and women. I think God has made us different. A woman is compatible to her husband and both add to one another. Both help the other.

And what your weekend she adds, and maybe what she's weekend, you come along and add to her. As 1 Peter 3, 7 tells us, 1 Peter 3, and we read here in verse 7, husbands dwell with them, talking about your wife, with understanding. You need to understand giving honor to the wife. So again, here in the New Testament, we give honor to our wife as to the weaker vessel and as being heirs together of the grace of life that your prayers may not be hindered. If there are problems between you and your wife, it's going to hinder your prayer life. So you need to get those worked out. Now notice it says, dwell with. Well, dwell with means referring to the domestic association, your marriage, your family. You dwell with them with understanding. So that means with knowledge, with intelligence, recognition of the marriage relationship. You understand them. You understand the differences and what she brings to the marriage. And you honor her, as it says here. She is precious to you. We need and we give honor and respect and love to our mate. Now when it says she is weaker, she's not mentally weaker. She's physically weaker is basically what it's referring to. Men are built different. I mean, you've got a 250-pound hairy chested behemoth married to a 120-pound wife. He's obviously physically, structurally stronger. But intellectually, spiritually, there's not a weakness. She's intellectually his equivalent. She's smart. She's intelligent. And we are just all different. She's just more sensitive and she's more fragile in that area.

Many of you will remember the story, and I thought it might be a good thing to relate again the butterfly and the buffalo. Remember the butterfly, which we'll use as an analogy referring to a woman, is very sensitive. You have a butterfly that sort of flitters around from flower to flower, tree to tree, and it's sensitive to the slightest breeze. The breeze comes along. The butterfly is blown this way, that way. It's up in the air and it gets a good panoramic view of what's going on below it. You can look down, see the beauty in the flowers, the shrubbery. It's very sensitive. You tie a rock to a butterfly's wing, and guess what? It's going to fall. It's going to injure itself. You've got to be very careful. You can't just reach out and grab a butterfly and say, I've got a butterfly, and squeeze it, and all at once, I've got a dead butterfly. You can't do that. You've got to treat a butterfly very carefully. And a buffalo is quite different. You have a buffalo. A buffalo could weigh 1,000, 1,500, 2,000 pounds. It could be callous, rough. It doesn't react to a breeze. A breeze can be blowing, and it doesn't even know it. In fact, it could be a gale wind, 30 miles an hour. It doesn't bother a buffalo. It just sort of plows on, eating, kicking rocks here and there, knocking boulders over, and just trotting along. And it doesn't even notice, perhaps, the flowers. Choose them, eats them, stomps on them, keeps moving. Whereas, you know, the butterfly would not do that. Tape a pebble to its back? Wouldn't even notice that it was there. It's tough. But a buffalo fulfills a certain position, doesn't it? It has a certain reason why it was created. A butterfly likewise. So it is in the marriage. A man could be compared to the buffalo, and if we're not careful, we sort of just plow through life. Whereas, here's this sensitive butterfly that we're married to. And we need to make sure that we understand the difference. A butterfly is not a buffalo, and a buffalo is not a butterfly. So it goes both ways. A woman is the heart and the nerve center of a marriage. She's the heart and the nerve center. So what we discover is simply this, that every couple is unique. Every couple is special.

We're all incomplete, both men and women, and God created the woman to help make the man complete. My wife literally adds 50% to our marriage as well as to my ministry, but yet our wives might be different. My wife's 50% of my marriage might be different than your wife's 50% that she adds to your marriage. She might add in different ways. You see, Jesus Christ considers His future bride important, which we should all consider our mates and other women, even if we're not married, important. Let's go back to Ephesians chapter 5. Ephesians chapter 5, where it talks about the marital relationship in verse 25.

We read, husbands, love your wives. Jesus Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for it. So Jesus Christ considered His bride so important that He was willing to die for her. So we as men need to be willing to give ourselves for our wives in work, in every way to help her.

We read here that beginning in verse 30, 30 For we are members of His body, of His flesh, and of His bones. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother, be joined to his wife, the tomb shall become one flesh. This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church. So we do truly become one flesh with one another. So it's not a battle of the sexist. It's an understanding and an awareness that we are different, that we both bring various characteristics to a marriage. We complement one another. Our wives were created by God to aid us, to assist us, to help us. Women will honor you and thank you for your love and your contribution to their lives. If you treat them in the proper way. So men, let's realize what a wonderful blessing our wives are to us. And women, don't forget how you're supposed to add to your husband. And we thank you again for doing so and realize what an honor it is to have been married, if you're no longer married.

And if you are, to your wife that you're married to, and if you're thinking about it in the future, what that wife can bring to you. So God created us, He made us, and God created marriage, and He intended that we help and assist one another.